Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/381

358 that his descendants should be taught the rules of hygiene and the development of their physique.

The callousness of the Chinese to suffering was amply displayed in the Taiping rebellion, recalling to us the fact that they retained the mediaeval frame of mind. The Crimean and American Civil wars saw the beginnings of modern nursing on the battlefields, and were conducted with some regard to human suffering, but the Taiping rebellion was cruel on both sides. Tsêng had no scruples whatever about beheading the rebels he captured. In 1861 his two brothers, being concerned about the great toll of human life, wrote their sentiments to their brother. In reply Tsêng assured them that the more rebels slain the better, for then the poison could be driven out; the religion of the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Brother should be destroyed together with the officials T'ien Yen (Celestial Rest) and T'ien Yu (Celestial Pleasure). "Even if we could cause [Duke] Chou and Confucius to be born now they would by no means think of anything but destroying rebels. And if one intends to destroy them one should not repine over slaying many of them and driving their turbans back to the farms." In the capture of Anking twenty thousand of the rebels were slain by the captors. In the operations about Nanking we have one instance recorded where after a bloody battle at San Ho K'ou, a like number were decapitated. Following the escalade at Nanking the gates were shut and the rebels hunted down in the streets with a slaughter of approximately a hundred thousand. Not long after that event, at Fuchow, General Pao Ch'ao executed forty thousand in cold blood. None of these massacres appears to have troubled the minds of the people of that time. Nor did the